In 1988, a programmer by the name of John Walker decided that he was going to approach his weight problem “…as something to be investigated, managed, and eventually solved.” Six months later John was no longer overweight. In 1991, he compiled his personal discoveries and results and distributed them online as The Hacker’s Diet in order to help others achieve the same success.

While it’s certainly an interesting read, The Hacker’s Diet isn’t revolutionary – it essentially boils down to eat less calories than you burn. However, John’s use of exponentially smoothed moving averages to trend one’s weight and become liberated from the tyranny of a fickle scale really struck a chord with me – both as a geek and someone who’s dieted diligently only to see the scale not reflect it.

I knew I wanted to incorporate those calculations into My Wasted Life, and luckily I decided to do a quick Google search before I started, because most of the work had already been done for me via The Hacker’s Diet plugin for WordPress. All of the weight calculations and charts on this site are based off of the code in that plugin. I had to do a bit of poking around to get the data displayed in the way I wanted (details of which can be found here) but that was trivial compared to all the work that had already been done.

So, despite the fact that neither of them will actually ever see this, I want to express sincere thanks to both John Walker and Keith Thornhill. Their work on The Hacker’s Diet and the The Hacker’s Diet plugin helped make this site possible.